


Speechless

by Mertiya



Series: Two Bright-hairs and a Doctor [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, Family, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Muteness, Parentlock, Post Reichenbach, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-28
Updated: 2013-02-28
Packaged: 2017-12-03 21:59:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/703072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rhonwen hasn't spoken in three years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Speechless

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this idea hit me suddenly. It's significantly angstier than the last fic in this series, but I hope people still like it. :)

         Sherlock’s nightmares are painted crimson.  In his sleep, he treads the same stairs he trod for all the long, brilliant months he spent in 221B, but the stairs are dyed incarnadine with carnage.  He passes Lestrade, whose body always lies across the bottom stair, his face caved in from the pressure of the sniper’s bullet.  On some level, Sherlock knows this is a dream (and he has never had nightmares like this before) but his mind is shadowy and made hazy with sleep and he cannot escape the trembling horror as he reaches down, his fingers touching his friend’s brains and blood.

         He nearly trips, but he must go on, because he must; above him, he can still hear muted voices and whispers, which means that above, there is still a chance.  Halfway up the stairs, the lights come on, and Mrs. Hudson is crumpled over her knees, head tilted forward.  Her blood has left a drying streak on the wall, too much, too red in a place that is muted with darkness. 

         Sherlock has never known pain like this pain, this pain that cuts him in two and pulls him apart, but he must go on, because still there are voices above him, lower, fewer now, but they are still there.  He tries to run, but he cannot run, can only march and soldier on upward at a weary, steady pace.  When he reaches the third step from the top, the voices cease.

         When he pushes open the door to Baker Street, it reveals first John’s torso sprawled prone across the ground, blood soaking his jumper over his left breast.  Sherlock’s breathing is ragged now and desperate, and his muscles tremble as he forces the door further, but when he sees the small hand lying open over John’s, he can no longer move, and he wakes, sweating cold and trembling, and reaches for his mobile to remind himself where his countdown is on a scale that goes from four to zero.

~

         Rhonwen’s dreams are blue.  She is a bird, flying through a blue sky, like in the storybook Papa reads to her every night.  She can read the words too; she knows the word _blue_ and the word _sky_ and the word _bird_.  Birds can _fly_ , and the _sky_ is _blue_.  She likes the words on the page, their pretty rounded letters that make meaning.  She likes the words in Papa’s voice too.  The way he says them is big ( _big_ is also a word that she can read), but it is also tired.  She wishes she could make Papa less tired.

         When she is a bird, she flies across the city.  Everything in the city is different shades of blue.  Blue shadows, and blue cars, and blue phone-boxes.  But Rhonwhen is trying to find a blue flag.  It is her Daddy’s flag, a banner like the knight in her storybook has.  The word _banner_ is difficult, and the word _pennant_ is even harder, but she likes them too.  _Pennant’s_ _t_ has the fluttery little edges of the object, but a _banner_ is sturdier.  She likes the letter _b_ , its solid edges and heavy sound.

         When she finds her Daddy’s flag, she flies toward it, because she is the knight’s messenger, and she can save her Daddy like the knight saves his princess in her storybook.  She just has to fly fast enough.

         But she is never fast enough.  Papa tells her to _use her words_ , but they don’t come.  Her mouth (which is a beak) opens up, but it doesn’t make any noise.  And she sees Daddy flying, but Daddy isn’t a bird, and he can’t fly, and he falls and falls, and when he hits the ground, there is a lot of blue.  There is blue everywhere.

~

         John no longer dreams.  He sleeps in short bursts and catnaps most of the time, because he does not like to sleep deeply when Rhonwen might need something.  She wakes unfailingly in the middle of the night, and if he is not there, she screams until he comes to her, unstopping, unceasing, a desperate wailing, wordless cry.

         At first, he told her to come find him.  It didn’t seem reasonable for him to spend his nights in her bedroom (because she never wakes at the same time from night to night), but no matter what he says, she nods carefully before bedtime, as if she understands, but when she wakes, she screams.  He begins to understand that the trouble is she isn’t really waking, that she can’t escape the grip of whatever it is she dreams about by herself.  Without him there, she believes she’s abandoned, alone, trapped inside a nightmare.

         So he sleeps curled on a chair in her room, even though his back protests in the morning.  Sunday is the only day he sleeps in a bed, and he doesn’t sleep at night at all; he spends the day curled up on Sherlock’s bed, sleeping for fourteen, fifteen hours at a stretch, far too heavily to dream.

         He isn’t sure what he would do if he didn’t have Rhonwen.  He isn’t sure how far his strength would stretch, after watching his best friend, his lover, the man who was half his world, throw himself to his death in front of him.  But his strength must be limitless, because in this river of grief that the two of them have been thrown, they only have each other, and she is so small and so lost and so quiet that he fears without him she would simply cease to exist.

         Rhonwen is his world now.  It’s important for him to remember that.  It’s important for him never to let her see his face when he thinks about Sherlock (which is too often; _everything_ reminds him of Sherlock), and it’s important that he remembers to smile at least fifty percent of the time, and it’s very, very important to talk to her and tell her to _use her words_ , because she is almost nine years old, and she has not spoken in three years.

         It’s called _selective mutism_ , and it’s commonly associated with social anxiety.  But most children with selective mutism are able to speak in at least some situations.  When Rhonwen first came to live with John and Sherlock, she spoke to John and Sherlock, but not to anyone else.  She got over it quite quickly; the psychiatrist was pleased with her progress.  Now she doesn’t speak at all, and this isn’t really _selective_ mutism anymore; it’s _progressive mutism_ , and no matter how much John tries, and her teachers try, and everyone tries—she can’t speak.

         She will write to John, her letters still wobbly and a little ill-formed; she will write to her teachers.  At first she didn’t have any friends, but pretty soon they made a game of it.  Now her whole class has mobile phones which they use to text back and forth.  Sometimes one of her classmates joins her in silence for the day, protesting that it’s “more fun” to talk by texting.  But it isn’t that Rhonwen won’t speak; it isn’t that she thinks it is more fun to text.  It’s that she can’t, the words formed stillborn upon her tongue.

         John hates himself sometimes, when he watches her sitting quietly at the window, when she looks up at him and smiles and reaches for her phone.  Her texts are happy, most of the time, and intelligent, if not always perfectly spelled or punctuated.  She’s doing well in school (very well), but she can’t speak.  And it’s his fault.

         If he had noticed it when she slipped away from Mrs. Hudson, before she got in the cab with him…

         If he had turned the cab around and dropped her back at Baker Street…

         It wouldn’t have made a difference to Sherlock.  But Rhonwen wouldn’t have been there.  Rhonwen wouldn’t have seen it happen.  If he had at least—turned her face away—stopped her from looking—but he hadn’t.  He hadn’t done anything, because he hadn’t been _able_ to do anything.  He had forgotten her.  He had left her standing on the sidewalk as he ran toward where Sherlock had fallen.

         And when he’d remembered—

         She’d been right there, right beside him as he knelt on the pavement, staring as they carried Sherlock’s body away on a stretcher, staring and staring, her face as white as the face as white as the dead man’s, two fingers in her mouth.  He’d finally managed to stagger upright and pull her into his arms, but she was limp and loose, each muscle relaxed, and all he could think was, _Oh god, I’ve lost them both, what have I done?_

~

         Rhonwen has a secret.  Every Sunday, when Papa is asleep, she finishes her homework really super-quick (maybe a little slapdash, but not so badly that she loses too many points), and then she takes out her phone and curls up in Daddy’s favorite chair and texts him.  Papa doesn’t know she has Daddy’s phone number memorized.

         And Papa doesn’t know that her texts always go through.  She thinks that maybe she found a crack in reality somehow, that maybe wherever Daddy is now (heaven?  Hell?  Just…gone?) he is getting her texts and even if he can’t text her back, he knows she’s here and maybe he knows a little bit of what she’s thinking.  She’s talking to him, even if he never talks back.

         Maybe that’s why her words don’t work.  She has read quite a lot about other universes and things like black holes, which makes her wonder about cracks in reality.  Maybe she can’t talk because she is breaking the rules by sending these texts, but that’s OK, really.  She knows Papa doesn’t like it that she can’t talk, and sometimes it makes her sad (because she loves words so much, the beautiful angles and curves, the breaths of air that rumble if you _voice_ them, or not if you don’t; she’s read a few books on linguistics, although she didn’t understand everything), but she would rather not be able to talk if she can still send her thoughts (and her love, though she doesn’t _say_ that, because Daddy never liked it if you said things right out; you had to be a little bit sneaky about it).

         Her texts are a hodgepodge of random statements and facts.

         _Did you no black holes stop tim?_

_I lerned how to spell metacarpal toda.  Papa laffed._

_Unkle Microft says I am good at chess._

_Papa was sad toda._

_You can cut a werm in haf and it will grow 2 werms_

_Wails are mamuls they breeth air_

_I am lerning vilin but I cant bow rite yet_

_Berds have hollo bones so they can fli so anjels dont work reely but they are still prity_

_Papa misses you_

_I miss you_

_I wish you cood com home_

She tries not to repeat herself, but it’s hard not to tell him she wishes he would come home at least once a month.  It’s hard not to tell him when Papa is sad.  Sometimes she even tells him things she doesn’t tell Papa, because she doesn’t want to worry Papa, but if Daddy is in heaven, he won’t really mind being worried, because he doesn’t have all the things to worry about that Papa does.

         _Im agnry at you_ , she texts him sometimes.  _You left Papa and me all alon and Papa is sad agen._

         But it’s funny, the time that she texted him the long story about how the headmistress didn’t believe that she _couldn’t_ talk, how she said that she just _needed to get over it_ (which hurt and it was scary, and she tried, she tried really hard, but the headmistress took away her mobile for the _whole day_ and she couldn’t talk to anybody properly, and she thought they might just disappear and she wouldn’t be able to yell after them and tell them not to go, and it was scary and horrible, but she didn’t want to tell Papa because he looked so tired and worried and at least she had her mobile back by then); when she texted him _that_ story, the headmistress didn’t come back the next day.

         She knew it wasn’t reasonable, but she liked to think that maybe Daddy had done some magic from heaven and made her teacher go away (although it was likelier that Uncle Mycroft just found out, because he was good at finding things out like that).

         Mrs. Hudson calls her an angel, which is really just the kind of silly thing grown-ups say.  Rhonwen does try to help out around the house, but she’s not very good at it, and she still wets her bed sometimes, even though she’s much too old for that sort of thing.  She tries to help Papa, but she’s not always too good at it, and sometimes she gets scared or angry or bratty, so she’s not an angel, not by a long shot, but it’s nice of Mrs. Hudson to say.

         Sometimes she has a tantrum, and she throws cups and dishes and things because it’s so not _fair_ , because nothing is fair, and Papa sighs and hugs her and cleans up, and she stands with tears running down her face and wishing she could talk, just so she could say _sorry_ , because even though she texts it right away, it just isn’t the same.

         One Sunday in early January, it is particularly grey and horrible outside, and she’s feeling disappointed because she was supposed to go over to Jamie’s house, but he had to cancel because his Granny came to visit suddenly (and that’s just not fair, Jamie has his mom and his dad and his gran and gramps and two brothers and an aunt and an uncle and all she has is Papa and Mrs. Hudson, not that she would trade them for anything, but wouldn’t it be nice to have _more_ family?  She supposes she also has Aunt Harry and Uncle Mycroft, but she _never_ sees them, and Papa quite often tells Aunt Harry to leave on the few occasions when she _does_ arrive, because she’s obviously been drinking, even Rhonwen can tell that much).  Papa is sleeping in his room, and she flops down on her bed to text Daddy.

         _We had new years without you agen,_ she sends him.  She should tell him about how boring school is (they’re learning to multiply and Rhonwen has known how to do that for two years already), or tell him something interesting she has learned, but she can’t follow her own rules when she is feeling so gloomy and sorry for herself.

         _It was boring_ , she types.  _It was tedious_.  She looked up how to spell ‘tedious’ a long time ago, and she never spells it wrong, because it is one of Daddy’s favorite words.  It’s one of the things she makes sure she remembers.  It’s kind of scary sometimes, the way things keep slipping away, no matter how hard she tries not to let them.

         _I cant rember what you look like_ , she types, and she’s sniffling a little, because she doesn’t _want_ to forget, but her brain just isn’t that good.  Well, obviously.  Since she can’t even _talk_.  Stupid brain.  _I want you to not be gon I want you to com home I want Papa to be happy agen I don’t want you to be an anjel_.  She looks at her text.  It’s much too emotional; it isn’t the kind of thing Daddy would like, but she doesn’t care, because today she’s angry at him, and this is the kind of tantrum she has at Daddy; she throws emotions instead of facts at him, typing furiously.  Then she throws the phone onto the bed, and she cries, just a little bit, just quietly. 

         Her phone vibrates, and maybe it’s Jamie.  Maybe he can see her for a little while, anyway, even though he’s not really supposed to text her outside of school.  She pulls her phone over and looks at it, and then looks again, and stares.

         _I have never been an angel. SH_

She has never wanted her words more.  She wants to scream for Papa, but she can’t; she can’t even _scream_.  Not only her words but her _voice_ has dried up, and all that comes out of her throat is a soft little squeak.

         She gets out of bed, but very carefully, because she has to keep looking at her phone, has to keep making sure she’s not dreaming.  She walks with her head down out the door of her bedroom, and she nearly walks right into the doorframe.

         She is halfway across the room to Daddy’s bedroom, when something makes her stop and look round.

         Daddy is standing in the doorway, and there is dark blue/red all down one cheekbone (red but it’s blue in the dark shadow).  Rhonwen’s voice comes back all of a sudden in a rush, and she screams, because Papa has to come now _now_ before Daddy disappears. But then everything is blue and red and she’s flying no falling no flying—

~

         Sherlock has blood all down the side of his face, but it isn’t his blood.  He is not sure how long he’s been awake this time—five or six days at least, long enough that even he is beginning to feel the effects—but there was never time to snatch sleep on this long, nightmarish journey.  He’d been from Inverness down to Plymouth, racing against time to reach Sebastian Moran, who was fighting for his life against the trap it had taken Sherlock three long years to bait and snare.  And he had still caught the man mere meters away from Baker Street.

         James Moriarty had died of a gunshot wound; Sebastian Moran died of knife wounds inflicted at close range.  Normally, Sherlock would never have put himself in the line of fire (not with Moran, trained army sniper, far more adept than Sherlock at both close- and far-range combat), but he had no choice.

         Not with the sniper rifle pointing across the street at 221B.

         He’s feeling the inconvenient effects of fatigue by this time; he is aware that his brain is no longer functioning at full capacity.  It seems to have spent its last functionality in that last long struggle with Moran, which, even now, is a blur of scarlet.  There was one horrible moment (the beginning of visual hallucinations from lack of sleep, which he has rarely experienced previously) when he was holding a bloody knife and it was John’s body on the floor in front of him (it was the toned body of a soldier, too easy to confuse in his slightly addled state).  Perhaps it was the color, the copious amounts of blood he never saw in such close proximity except in his (grindingly illogical) nightmares.

         If he were not so cursedly tired, he would not have responded to the text that the Child sent, but he had colored the phone red in a red hand, and it was a time that he knew, with every fiber of his being, that _he was not an angel._

         And before he had thought, he had pressed _send_ , and then he was walking, and there was still red everywhere, and suddenly, now, he is here, and as he steps inside a flat he has not seen in three years (and this is the first time in three years the weight on his shoulders has diminished), the Child comes hurrying down the stairs from John’s bedroom.

         Strange.  She is taller, and her hair is longer and has grown darker.  It ought to be honey-brown, but is closer to ebony.  When their eyes meet, she screams.  Then she goes pale, and she falls.

         He has the strangest memory, of standing in the National Antiquities Museum, watching a woman drop a centuries old teapot; his body does the same instant warning, muscles tensing against the prospect of such an item sustaining damage, and, now as he did then, he reflexively moves to cup the falling object, knees bending, one hand beneath her head, laying her on the couch.

         “Oh God.”

         He looks up and meets John’s eyes.

~

         John wakes from a heavy slumber to Rhonwen’s thin scream echoing through the flat.  _Oh god_.  This isn’t a nightmare, because she doesn’t have nightmares during the day.  She doesn’t sleep on Sundays, because it’s John’s day to sleep, and there’s an unspoken rule not to disturb him unless it’s vital (because he has to sleep sometime, much as sometimes he’d prefer not to, still afraid, even after three years, that his mind will slip from his grasp and show him in dreams what he never wants to see, what he never wants to think about).

         Oh god, _Rhonwen._   He can’t lose her.  He’s tumbling out of bed, falling across his desk, yanking the gun out of its drawer (because no one is going to fucking live if they’ve hurt her, _they will fucking die_ ), and then he’s in the other room, and there is a tall, spare figure tucking her legs beneath her on the couch, and—

         --he has the sensation of falling.

         Is this what going insane is like?

         “Oh god,” he says numbly, because it’s not.

         It can’t be.

         _It’s all a magic trick._   The words rearrange themselves inside his head, in front of his eyes.  This is what Sherlock meant. 

         “You fucking _bastard_.”

         “John…”  Sherlock sounds confused, maybe repentant.

         “How could you _do_ this to her?  How could you do this to _me_?”

         “I had no choice.”

         He’s not sure he can find a way to explain this, but he tries, and his voice comes out broken.  “Sherlock…you…you took her _words_.”

         “It was that or her life, John.  Which would you have chosen?”

         And now he’s struck dumb himself, as Sherlock’s words slice him straight to the core, but his lips open, and his voice vibrates, a whispered echo, “Her life?”

         Sherlock draws himself up to his full height.  There is blood speckling down his face, down his right hand, blood smeared across his coat and soaking his scarf (but it’s not his); the right side of his face is mottled with bruising.  “Her life and yours, John.  If I didn’t jump.  If I didn’t make it _convincing_.”  He spits the last word, and John’s leg gives out, spilling him onto the floor.

         “Christ,” he says.  “Moriarty was targeting her?  He was targeting a _five-year-old child_?”

         “Did you fail to register the children he trapped in a disused factory with mercury-covered candy as their only food source, John?”

         The world is swaying sickeningly beneath John, and he’s going to be sick.  “Oh Christ,” he mutters.  “Oh, _Christ_.”

         Sherlock is beside him in an instant, tipping his face up.  “She’s safe,” he says fiercely.  “You’re both safe, John.  You’re _safe_.”  His voice cracks, and then he is kissing John, and John doesn’t know what he’s doing; he’s so afraid that he’s asleep, that he’s going to wake up any minute, but if he’s really dreaming finally—

         “I missed you,” he says, and he kisses Sherlock fiercely, desperately.  He’s so angry, so _desperately_ angry, left alone and grieving and _broken_ for three years, but he knows why it had to be this way.  Because Rhonwen needed _someone_ , and Sherlock—god—he’s covered in someone’s blood.  You don’t get blood spatters like this from anything but very close, intimate death (and John is fairly sure who was doing the dying).

         John pulls back from the kiss and leans his forehead against Sherlock’s, running his hands across Sherlock’s face, his chin, his arms, stick-thin and emaciated within his voluminous coat.  “You haven’t been eating,” he murmurs.

         “I never eat,” Sherlock says sharply.

         “Yes, you do,” John smiles, and he takes Sherlock’s bloody hands and moves the fingers, the joints, marveling at how much the same they feel, at how they have retained their shape.  There are new scars along the backs of his knuckles, and his hands are scraped and bruised like his face, but his injuries appear superficial.

         He isn’t sure what he’s feeling anymore.  He’s still angry (and he’d quite like to punch Sherlock, but at the same time, he aches inside to see the purple bruising down that long, ascetic face), but in some ways the anger is unimportant, because he looks back across three long years, and he understands why he never dreamed.

         He has been asleep for three years, in hibernation, too numb with pain to move on (and perhaps the hiatus stemmed, too, from the wild, crazy hope he could never entirely damp down, a hope which was too insane and painful to articulate, even if it turns out now that it was right all along).  Waking up hurts more than he would ever have expected, but it feels so much better, too.

         “Sherlock,” he murmurs.  “I’m going to yell at you later.”

         “Acceptable,” Sherlock says immediately.  He turns his hands over and clutches at John’s shoulders, pulling him up and then kissing him, small, fluttering kisses across his face, forehead, throat, hands.  Sherlock is observing him with kisses, John realizes, as if he can’t decide what the most important thing for him to do next is, so he has to do them all at once.

         There is a small movement from the couch, and both of them turn.  In the half-darkened light, Sherlock’s face looks hollow and swamped with terror, a naked emotion John knows he would never show unless he is utterly exhausted, and he makes a mental note to get Sherlock into a shower and then a bed as quickly as possible.  Remonstrations and questions can wait.

         Rhonwen is sitting up on the couch.  Her eyes look enormous.  John stretches out a hand toward her as Sherlock stares, appearing to withdraw into himself.  He’s afraid, John realizes, he’s afraid she won’t _recognize_ him.  No, he’s not afraid; he’s resigned.  He isn’t even expecting her to recognize him. 

         Rhonwen looks slowly back and forth between the two of them, and then her face breaks into a huge smile.  “Daddy,” she says, and John’s mouth drops open.  “You came home.” 

~

         That night, John’s dreams are green, the brilliant, warm emerald of the English countryside.  He wanders through fields and over stiles and hedges with Sherlock and Rhonwen, their daughter tucked in between the two of them.  Sherlock complains and deduces and finally, John and Rhonwen ambush him, throw him to the ground, and tickle him (Sherlock is ridiculously ticklish, a fact which Rhonwen discovered, and which John and Rhonwen exploit to its utmost).

         John smiles in his sleep, because he knows that this dream, while not prophetic, is still going to come true.  Probably soon.

         Rhonwen’s dreams are still blue, but they are a warm blue, the color of the sky after the rain.  She wings her way across the sky, but she isn’t a bird.  She’s an angel, and she can fly, even though she shouldn’t be able to.  Daddy stands on a rooftop, his _pennant_ fluttering in the wind, and she swoops down and takes his hand, and they fly together to meet Papa, who is waiting for them in a floating taxi-cab with Uncle Mycroft.  He takes them into the clouds and they have blue ice-cream, and she makes Daddy eat it, even though he complains.  Papa laughs, and she talks and talks and talks.  Not everything she says makes sense, but she just has fun with the sounds that come out of her throat, the sibilance of her _s_ ’s ( _sibilance_ is fun to say!), the heavy, sort of angry growl of her _g_ ’s, the bravery of her _b_ ’s, and the way all her letters curve together and flow together to make her meaning, out of her own lips and throat.

         She’s going to talk a _lot_.  She’s going to talk so much that Daddy and Papa have to _beg_ her to stop (but they’ll never do that).  She’s going to talk until her voice is hoarse and her throat hurts, and Papa will laugh and tease her and maybe he’ll call her _motormouth_ (which is a fun humming sort of word), and Daddy will raise an eyebrow at him and maybe be sarcastic at him, and it’s all going to be perfect. 

         It’s all perfect already.

         Sherlock does not dream.  He sleeps heavily, wearily, the first rest he has had in three years. John is tucked on his left side, head resting against his shoulder, and the Child is curled against his right, and he’s warm and safe, and he does not need to dream.

         When Mrs. Hudson comes to check on John and Rhonwen, she drops her empty teacup, which shatters against the floor.  Rhonwen and John do not wake, but Sherlock’s heavy eyes open for a moment, and he smiles at her (an almost-smile, a Sherlock-smile, but a real smile all the same).

         She smiles back, and his eyes slide closed again, and she cleans up her teacup and tiptoes back out of the room and heads back downstairs again, where she makes herself another cup of tea and sits sipping it and feeling happy, because there’s a whole family back in Baker Street, and families are a nice thing to have about the place.

        


End file.
